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An interview with Ryan Britt, the author of The Spice Must Flow, about Dune’s once-covert climate change message.
For someone who’s been hit by the Dune curse, author Ryan Britt was in good spirits when I spoke to him about his new book, The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune, from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies, on Friday. “It has to be something, always,” he told me brightly, in reference to the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation — to which last week’s release of The Spice Must Flow had been loosely tied — getting delayed to next year due to the Hollywood strikes. Still, Britt winces at himself when he remembers he’s called Dune: Part Two a “2023 film” in print.
I imagine, though, that Britt’s readers will forgive him. The Spice Must Flow is a wonderfully enjoyable companion guide to Dune, including for people who aren’t really that deep into Arrakis lore (or haven’t, like me, read beyond Frank Herbert’s first book). Touching on everything from the nonfiction magazine article that was the earliest version of Dune, to the turbulent attempts to adapt the novel into a film, Britt also gives welcome space to how Herbert’s sandworm-populated, drugged-up sci-fi saga serves as “an ecological guide to the future.” Our conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
Where were you when you learned Dune: Part Two was being pushed back?
I was getting ready to make my six-year-old daughter dinner with my wife. I shouldn’t say that I was making dinner — I think my wife was getting ready to make dinner and I was helping and hanging out with my daughter. And I got a text from my literary agent just saying, “Had you seen this?”
But you know, I had seen the rumors that it was potentially going to happen. And just from an entertainment industry/publishing standpoint, it’s the most Dune thing that could possibly happen. I was joking with many people that writing a book about Dune is like — I'm entering into a world that was very hard for David Lynch and very hard for Frank Herbert and [Alejandro] Jodorowsky and Denis Villeneuve. Something always happens to people who are doing Dune projects. It was like, “Okay, so I don’t get to have a book out at the same time as the movie? I’m getting off easy compared to Lynch, who lost like four years of his life or whatever.”
You write that “the public perception of Dune as an ecological science fiction novel is perhaps the most important factor in its immortality.” But as you note in your book, Herbert didn’t exactly set out to write an ecological science fiction book. How did Dune gain the reputation of environmental literature that it has today?
I want to be careful about this because I think that it’s possible that Frank Herbert did have that intention. He dedicated the first novel to “dry land ecologists.” He began writing a nonfiction article about real sand dunes, and that led to writing Dune. I just don’t think that environmentalism was his sole intention or his sole motivating factor in completing the first book. By evidence in my research and the research of others, he played up that [intention] after it was claimed by environmentalists.
The big thing that happened is Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 picked Dune as an ecological text, and then Frank Herbert spoke at Earth Day in 1970. I actually brought with me as a prop the New World or No World (1970) book, which was based on a TV special Herbert did. [Reading from the book’s cover:] “‘Our ecology crisis and what to do about it,’ edited by Frank Herbert.” So this is where, by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, Herbert really starts saying Dune was an ecological book.
And that’s definitely in the text. But at the same time, the planet ecologist who is the father of Liet-Kynes, Pardot Kynes — all of that is from the appendices that are in the novel but weren’t in the original serialized magazine versions. A lot of the big ecological ruminations are sort of covert in the first run. But even in New World or No World, where Herbert talks about putting the words of ecological concern into the mouths of his characters — that’s from the appendices. So I think that he was always throwing down a message about climate change and a message about how corrupt governments contribute to that, but he wasn’t talking that up in ‘63 and ‘65, when the first versions of the book came out. But by 1968, ‘69, ‘70, he certainly was, because the Whole Earth Catalog thing happened and I think environmentalists were clearly his people in a way that, perhaps, other science fiction writers were not.
Do you think that part of the reason Dune had mainstream success was because this environmental interpretation made it seem like more “serious” literature to readers who might not have picked up a sci-fi book otherwise?
Yes, absolutely. The reason why Dune is mainstream is because of the ecological messaging. And that’s not just true of the first novel, which is by far and away the most popular, but the thing also about Herbert is that he makes good on the idea that Dune is an ecological series in the sequels.
By the time we get to Children of Dune(1976), he has a very interesting message about climate change, which is that the sandworms are an endangered species but they’re also essential to the economy because they create the spice — the spice is an allegory for all natural resources that power transportation. So some of the best ecological messaging comes out of the sequels. Children of Dune was the first hardcover bestseller science fiction novel — in terms of being marketed as a science fiction novel — of all time. And in that book is when Herbert says, look, not only does climate change and ignoring climate change have a negative effect on our environment, but it has a negative effect on the economy as well.
Children of Dune is when Arrakis has been terraformed, like forced climate change. But it’s the reverse from us because instead of turning it into a worse environment, they’re actually making it more livable. But that is the thing that’s actually against the existing environment, and the thing that’s going to threaten to kill the sandworms and disrupt everything. So Herbert inverts the literalness by saying, Okay, this kind of forced climate change seemed like a great idea, one that the Fremen wanted, to transform it into a paradise. But now here we are, two books later, and not that much time has passed, and we’re looking at the extinction of the sandworms and the collapse of everything.
The environmental movement in the U.S. has changed a lot since Frank Herbert died in 1986. Were he still alive today, do you think he’d still be writing books with environmental themes? Or was it a passing fancy when it came to Dune?
No, no, he certainly would be. Absolutely. You could look at books like The Green Brain, and some of his other books, and definitely it’s there.
It’s interesting because you look at someone like Elon Musk — we all know there’s a political problem with Musk more broadly, and he’s almost like a character from Dune. Because he’s like, “I’m going to create all these electric vehicles,” but at what cost, right? Herbert was interested in political figures — Musk wouldn’t think of himself as a political figure, but he is — and the people with power who people don’t question. If we all agree that electric cars are good, then that would be Musk, right? But Musk is like Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune, and Leto II has ulterior motives in the end but so many people have to die to get there. So I think that if you could have Frank Herbert alive to see what’s going on with Elon Musk, he’d be like, “This is exactly what I was talking about.”
Is there anything else you’d like Heatmap readers to know about Dune?
What is really cool about Dune when it comes to its ecological messaging is that, like all good art, it is not an after-school special. That allows it to sink in more effectively. The irony that I point out in my book is that New World or No World is essentially an after-school special — it was literally on TV as a segment of people talking about the whole problem of climate change. [Reading from the book:] “I refuse to be put in a position of telling my grandchildren: ‘Sorry, there’s no world for you. We’ve used it all up.’ —Frank Herbert.” He is an environmentalist. But this book is not in print, and Dune is.
So why is Dune in print when we have to find that messaging? Because we have to find it: It’s not flashing on a giant sign like in Avatar or something like that. It’s not turning to the camera.
You look at something like Dune and you’ve got 60 years of people talking about it and thinking about it. And the “thinking about it” part is essential because people won’t change their minds with, like, a TV special. They will change their minds with a novel. A novel, a story, can move people.
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On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.
On the Senate Finance Committee’s budget proposal, the NRC, and fossil-fuel financing
Current conditions: A brush fire that prompted evacuations in Maui on Sunday and Monday is now 93% contained • The Des Moines metro area issued its first-ever ban on watering lawns due to record nitrate concentrations in nearby rivers • For only the fourth time since 1937, Vancouver, British Columbia got no rain at all in the first half of June. The dry streak may finally break tonight.
The Senate Finance Committee published its portion of the budget reconciliation bill on Monday night, including details of its highly anticipated plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits. Though the Senate version slightly softens the House’s proposed phase out of tax credits, “the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act,” my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Robinson Meyer write in their breakdown of the bill. Other changes to be aware of include:
There’s more, too, which you can read here.
President Trump fired Chris Hanson, a Democrat and his first-term appointee to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Friday. Trump “terminated my position … without cause, contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees,” Hanson said in his announcement, published Monday. Since the creation of the NRC, which regulates nuclear power, no commissioner has ever been fired from the body.
After being appointed by Trump in 2020, Hanson was promoted to chair the commission by President Biden in 2021. His term ended in January, after which he returned to serving on the board, Notus reports. Trump’s decision to fire Hanson comes on the heels of his recent flurry of executive orders aimed at quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity, including a measure seeking to “simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for processing new applications to 18 months at the longest,” as my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Katie Brigham explained last month. News of Hanson’s firing was met with “serious dismay” by attendees of the American Nuclear Society conference underway in Chicago, per Katy Huff, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a statement, ANS argued that a “competent, effective, and fully staffed [NRC] is essential to the rapid deployment of new reactors and advanced technologies.”
Banks increased fossil fuel financing by more than one-fifth in 2024, marking the first time that fossil fuel financing has failed to decline since 2021, a new report by the Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups found. Among the world’s top 65 largest banks, coal, oil, and gas assets rose by $162 billion, to $869 billion, with JPMorgan Chase seeing the biggest increase of more than a third to $53.5 billion, followed by Citigroup, Bank of America, and Barclays. In a statement to the Financial Times, JPMorgan said it believed its own data “reflects our activities more comprehensively,” and said it provided $1.29 in clean-energy financing for every dollar financing fossil fuels. However, as the report argues, “Banks are abandoning their previously announced emissions reduction targets in favor of temperature trajectories that allow for more fossil fuel finance. Though they may also increase financing of renewable energy, banks’ continued fossil fuel finance entrenches climate chaos and undercuts clean energy development.” Read the full findings here.
Drivers in Europe are becoming more unwilling to consider switching to an electric vehicle, outpacing even the growing reluctance seen in the United States, according to a new survey published by Shell on Tuesday. In Europe, 41% of respondents said they’d consider switching to an EV, down from 48% last year, while in the U.S., the number fell only 3 percentage points, to 31%. “Europe surprised us,” David Bunch, Shell’s chief for mobility and convenience, said, per Reuters. “The single biggest barrier to entry is the cost of the vehicle.”
While Shell — the world’s second-biggest fossil fuel company by revenue and profit — might seem an unlikely source for an electric vehicle survey, the company also has the most extensive EV charging network in the UK. Its findings weren’t all negative, either: in China, interest in buying an electric vehicle was as high as 89%. Additionally, Shell found that nine in 10 EV drivers would consider purchasing an electric vehicle again, and 60% said they worry less about running out of charge than they did a year ago, Bloomberg reports. Separately, International Energy Agency data shows that electric vehicle adoption continues at a healthy pace worldwide, exceeding 17 million sales globally in 2024, or a share of more than 20%.
Global electric car sales, 2014-2024
IEA
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced its commitment of £7.9 billion, or more than $10 billion, to the nation’s most extensive flood defense infrastructure program in its history. The program will not only include traditional construction, such as flood barriers, but also nature-based solutions like reforestation and wetland restoration, according to Business Green. In its announcement, the government said that for every £1 invested, it expected to prevent £8 in economic damage. “Protecting citizens is the first duty of any government,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed said in a statement, adding, “As our changing climate continues to bring more extreme weather to the nation, it's never been more vital to invest in new flood defences and repair our existing assets.” Separately, the U.K. Treasury also announced Tuesday a plan to spend £1 billion, or about $1.3 billion, on “funding to repair bridges, tunnels, and flyovers that are facing increased impacts from extreme weather and heavier vehicles,” Business Green adds.
Republicans in Los Angeles who don’t have air conditioning are “more likely to consider climate change a human-caused threat and more likely to support individual and government action to address climate change” than Republicans who have central air, a recent study published by the American Meteorological Society found. There was no similar divide among Democrats.